UKUUG

Once again the format of the newsletter has changed
slightly.
At their last meeting, your Council decided to stop
sticking the cover CD on the front cover, so you should
find your CD elsewhere in the envelope of goodies.
If not, contact Jane at Owles Hall and complain!

You should also find in the envelope a "Powered by
Linux" badge.
These were commissioned by Council and are suitable for
fixing to PCs, laptops, etc. and reflect the growing
interest in Linux.
Once again, contact Jane if yours is missing, or you would
like a few more.

Support for the Open Source movement continues to grow and
this is reflected in a number of articles.
We are particularly fortunate to include a piece from Andrew
Hume (President of our sister organisation on the other
side of the pond, Usenix) stating why he is "coming
home" to UNIX.

According to Council, the June cover CD will be a Linux
distribution and the September cover CD will be targeted
at E-commerce.
If you want something on a cover CD, then let your
Council, or Jane, have the details.

Well, it's 16.30 on press day for the newsletter and here I am writing
the Chairman's Report. My excuse is that I got engrossed in reading the
Linux kernel today so I didn't get round to it till now. (I don't
recommend reading the Linux kernel BTW - the style is horrendous!)

So, what to say? Well, first I suppose I should castigate those of you
who didn't come to our Winter conference. This is a traditional UKKUG
event and is really intended as an excuse for members to get together
and talk as well as to listen to some technical presentations. Those of
us who were there did indeed talk and listen to some excellent
presentations. Basically, you missed out so make sure that you are
there this year.

Second I should welcome all our new members and encourage them to get
involved - the more active members we have the better it is for
everybody. It would be good if we could get some more Local User Groups
going, but that needs the Local Users to Group. So get grouping.

Hmm, next I should mentiuon our astoundingly successful evening at the
Commonwealth Institute with Eric Raymond. We had over 200 people
attending (lucky we didn't book the smaller room!) and everyone enjoyed
the presentation - even those who knew all about it anyway. The only
slight problem was finding somewhere for 60 or so people to eat together
afterwards!

We are hoping to repeat the same success with our Richard Stallman
talk at the same venue on March 23rd. I hope that you can come along for
what promises to be yet another interesting evening, and note that you
can get a reduce entry fee to the UNICOM Open Source event that is
being held that same day.

What else? Nothing really except to tell you make sure to keep an eye
on all the developments in Open Source that are happening at the moment
- and there are a lot of them. Oh, and enjoy the newsletter which is
its usual eclectic mix of reviews and other stuff.

February 15th was
famous this year for more than being the day after
Valentine's day.

It was the day when a number of
co-ordinated protests were made across the world.

The remarkable thing about Refund day was
not the number of people involved, which was only a matter
of hundreds of active participants but the huge media
interest that was generated. I myself was interviewed for a
TV programme to be shown on Channel 5 which covered the
issues raised by the Refund day as part of a wider picture
of the interplay between the Internet and Open Source
software, Microsoft and issues of Software piracy. As I was
writing this the transmission date was not set but please
visit my website
http://www.deluxe-tech.co.uk
where I should have screening information by the time you
read this.

What was refund day all
about? It was not 'Microsoft Bashing' or an encouragement to
piracy.

Simply Microsoft's End User Licence Agreement
says (or rather said) in the small print that they can
contact their hardware supplier about "returns of
unused products for a refund".

With
much tenacity several intrepid users managed to get refunds
out of their hardware suppliers and, as an exercise in
building of the successes of the few, the whole concept of
the Refund Day took shape.

If you want to buy a PC from a major
manufacturer and particularly if you want to buy a portable
PC, you are forced into paying part of that cost for a
bundled Microsoft Operating System. Major hardware vendors
get large and undisclosed discounts of the exorbitant
'street price' of Windows OS and Office software. However
the EULA says that if the user is unwilling to accept
Microsoft's licencing terms they are entitled to return
unused products for a refund.

There
are a growing number of people now who want PCs but never
intend to run a Microsoft Operating System on them. Is it
fair that they have to pay a proportion of the price of such
a machine as effectively a 'Microsoft Tax'? Although what
the computer manufacturer pays for software is not as much
as retail price it is still a seizable amount - especially
now that 'budget' PCs are going well under the £500
mark. There are two things that people can do about this.
One way is to buy from smaller manufacturers. They do not
enjoy the attractive discounts that the big boys do and are
generally now willing to make Windows a separate and
optional item on the price list. Just get a copy of Micro
Mart and you will find plenty of manufacturers willing to
sell 'built to order' computer systems without Windows.

All very well if you are happy to by
"generic" systems. Personally I have built my own
systems from parts for several years now. I would recommend
it as you get the freedom to choose exactly what you want.
However it is not so attractive if you are specifying 100 or
1000 systems. The confidence of going with a well-known
manufacturer then counts for more than flexibility.

The problem is that major manufacturers and
particularly the manufacturers of portable computers are
not yet as flexible as the many thousands of small
"generic" PC builders. Even here though things are
just starting to change with both Dell and HP now offering
systems with Linux instead of Windows pre-installed. If you
have been forced to buy Windows because you wanted to buy a
specific computer and have never used it you are "in
theory" entitled to a refund.

"In theory" as to actually start giving refunds
on a large scale would land big troubles for Microsoft.

How much should the refund be? Revealing that would be
revealing the highly secret discount structure.

Refund day is more a point of principal than a
serious attempt to get £50 or so refunds for the 10
million plus Linux users. Also there is the situation where
systems have been sold with bundled software "worth
hundreds of pounds!" both from Microsoft and other
vendors but all useless without Windows. How much is such a
bundle really worth? For several years now many
manufacturers have depended on big software bundles to give
themselves competitive edge. How many of you have bought PCs
with bundled software little of which actually saw any use?

By the way I am not myself seeking a
refund. I do use my copy of Windows but only about 10% of
the time. The more software gets ported to Linux the less I
will have to spend in Windows. 10% use did not justify
upgrading to Win98 nor will it justify going to Win2000.

Microsoft claim that the refund day was just
a publicity stunt. As a stunt it was highly effective with a
high level of news coverage both before and after the event.
The media are now ready to listen to the message that there
is more to the future of the computer industry than
successive versions of Windows and Office.

The thing that is most damaging to Microsoft out of
all this that as a company that is so hot on holding others
to the terms of contracts and licenses should be caught out
with a term in an agreement that hundreds of millions of
people have supposedly agreed to, that Microsoft itself has
no intention of keeping. Is the Windows EULA really worth
the paper it is printed on?

The best
thing that Refund Day can achieve would be to allow all PC
buyers to opt out from being charged for Windows if they do
not wish to use it. If manufacturers want to temporarily
licence Windows to test that a system works with it, then it
is up to them to come to a suitable agreement with Microsoft
for such a use. Blindly assuming that the buyer is willing
to accept and carry on with the licence has to end.

We are very pleased to announce that the 1999 subscription
payments have been coming in at a steady rate, thank you to
all our prompt paying members!

For those who haven't paid yet we shall be sending out the
first reminders next month.

The UKUUG Council first meeting of 1999 was held in London
on 9th February. Discussions on future events for UKUUG
were top on the Agenda and a full programme is envisaged for
1999 and 2000.

You should find (fingers crossed) a Powered by LINUX badge
in with this Newsletter mailing - we are sending a badge to
each UKUUG member - please let us know what you think about
the badges and if you require any more!

The CD this month is also enclosed in the envelope instead
of being stuck on the front of the Newsletter - it was
thought by Council that you would prefer this method which
means you don't have to rip the front page to get the CD off!

We are pleased to announce that the Eric Raymond evening
talk held on 20th January was a great success with more than
200 attendees.

The next UKUUG evening meeting will be held on Tuesday 23rd
March at The Commonwealth Institute, Kensington, London,
where Dr. Richard Stallman will give a presentation from
7.00p.m. - 9.00 p.m. entitled The GNU Project and the
GNU/LINUX System - details have already been circulated to
our members - please note that there is no need to pre-book
and a booking fee is NOT necessary.

Using those Spare Cycles

(Report by David Hallowell)

The UKUUG Winter Conference had been held in the North
for the past few years so it was decided to bring it back down
South for the 1998 event. This was the first winter
conference I attended and it meant a lot of travelling for
me from Newcastle. However, the one o'clock start meant that
I had plenty of time to reach Essex.

The Wivenhoe House Hotel, where the conference was held,
is located in the grounds of the University of Essex. It is
an 18th Century manor house surrounded by extensive parklands;
it was only a short bus or taxi ride away from Colchester's
main railway station.

The conference was spread over two days with a conference
dinner and lunch available. This is keeping with the
tradition of previous winter conferences (so I believe). The
conference was organised by former UKUUG chairman Mick
Farmer.

After registration and a chance to meet the other
delegates the conference got underway with Savas Parastatidis
from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne with a paper
entitled Implicit Parallel Computing on Networks of
Workstations Using NIP. The paper describes NIP which
Savas and Paul Watson are developing at Newcastle
University.

Parallel architectures based on networks of commodity
hardware workstations are proving to be cost-effective
platforms for the execution of parallel scientific
applications. Systems like Avalon have demonstarted that it
is possible to have vast computational power only for a
fraction of the cost of a customised supercomputer. However,
if networks of workstations are to become widely used as
parallel systems, programming methodologies that ease the
development of parallel applications must be used. Many
believe that the commonly used message passing methodology
is too complex and time consuming and puts too many
responsibilities on the programmer. Programmers have the
responsibility for making the important decisions on how to
exploit parallelism. This has major advantages and requires
specialist expertise to become a parallel programmer.

For this reason the design of an implicit parallel system
has been investigated in which it is the compiler and
run-time system, rather than the programmer, that are
responsible for the creation and management of parallelism.
The run-time system, called? NI, has been designed and a
prototype of it has been implemented. NIP removes from the
programmer the burdens of dividing a program into parallel
tasks, sharing work evenly across all nodes, organising
communication between tasks, making the data available to
tasks that require it, and synchronising tasks.

A very detailed paper discusses parallel programming
languages, the parallel machine architectures, an overview
of NIP design, the NIP execution Model and the Distributed
Shared Memory Model. The details of which are too extensive
to reproduce here.

There are plans to extend NIP in a number of directions.
First, the behaviour of a wider range of parallel programs
will be analysed. A set of advanced caching features are
also being designed to improve the efficiency of the NIPDSM
(NIP Distributed Shared Memory system) by copying and
caching groups of objects rather than single objects.
Finally, they're investigating the mapping of other high
level languages onto NIP; the initial focus is on extracting
implicit parallelism from Java programs.

After a short coffee break Peter Lister presented his
paper entitled Persuading Professors to Purchase a Pile
of PCs which outlined his experiences of constructing
a Beowulf at Cranfield University. The idea to construct a
Beowulf arose as the university needed a powerful system
with a limited budget (£150K). A Beowulf meant they
could construct a powerful system with cheap Intel hardware
and Linux which is free. Then only needed 20% of their
budget to construct the Beowulf which meant that the other
80% could be spent on other hardware.

The main problem was some of the professors were doubtful
about the success of a Beowulf and needed persuading (hence
the title). As only a small amount of the budget was going
to be spent on the Beowulf it meant that the professors that
didn't think that constructing a Beowulf would be a good
idea as the money good be spent on more proven hardware
(such as Alphas, Sparcs, etc) could be reassured that there
was still 80% of the budget available for them. For those
that thought a Beowulf would never work they were reassured
by the fact that as it was ordinary PC hardware they could
easily trade the hardware in or use the machines as ordinary
desktop PCs or Linux file servers. For those who were in
support of the Beowulf but thought it should be bigger were
told if it was successful they could apply for funding for a
bigger system.

Once the professors were persuaded the task was to buy
the hardware and set up the Beowulf. Peter's motto
was Don't be proud - scrounge and he contacted dan,
their supplier for Intel based hardware, who offered him the
option to return it after 3 months if it all went wrong or
upgrade at low cost if it was a success. The set-up
consisted of a master machine and 16 slaves (all 300MHz
Pentium II's with 192MB DRAM). The operating system used was
Red Hat Linux 5.0 (Red Hat now have an Extreme Linux
distribution designed for Beowulf's but this setup pre-dated
this) with the slaves configured with Kickstart. Other
software was LAM 6.1, PBS (for batch queuing) and a mixture
of applications developed in-house.

They did suffer problems with the hardware. The PC's used
AMIBIOS which insists on having a keyboard and video card
for the machine to boot up (if you plan to construct a
Beowulf make sure that the BIOS in the machines you plan to
use don't require a keyboard to be connected unless you have
plenty of spare keyboards) and when the memory in the
machines was upgraded a lot of errors started to occur -
they insisted that all the memory in the machines to be
identical and the problem went away.

They had a few problems with Fortran compilers (try
before you buy) and a few problems with LAM but in the whole
the problems were minimal.

The benchmarks for their Beowulf (they called it The
Borg) were impressive. The benchmarks compared
favourably with an 8 processor SGI Origin which would have
cost £120K compared to £30K for the Beowulf.

The third speaker was Laurent DeGrouve who is a
representative from distributed.net. On the
distributed.net
web page they claim to
be The Fastest Computer on Earth. distributed.net
consists of a network of thousands of volunteers around the
world who run a special client on their machines. This
client utilises the idle CPU time of the machine to tackle
the current project. At the moment distributed.net are
working on cracking a message encrypted with an RC5-64 key,
previous projects have involved cracking DES and RC5-54.
Laurent described how distributed.net works both at the
client level and at the server level which involves
receiving completed keys from the clients and sending new
keys for the clients to crack. An important part of
distributed.net is their stats server where you can check
the overall progress in the latest project or your own
individual progress and if you've joined a team your teams
progress.

The current and past projects all involved cracking some
form of encryption but future projects are designed to be
more varied. The next project planned involves finding
Optimal Golomb Rulers which is the term given to a set of
whole numbers where no two pairs of numbers have the same
difference. For more information on this future challenge
see
http://www.distributed.net/ogr/

Possible projects for the future include a distributed
chess engine, finding large prime numbers, scanning radio
signals for extra-terrestrial life, finding fermat numbers
and probably more cryptography projects.

Anyone is free to join distributed.net and become a part
of the fastest computer on Earth.

A 30 minute panel session followed which gave the
delegates a further chance to ask the speakers questions.
This panel session was the end of the first day's conference
proceedings. Most of us made our way to the Hotel bar which
gave us another chance to meet the speakers and other
delegates. This was followed by an excellent dinner at 8pm.
It was an ideal end to the first day.

The conference resumed the next day at 10am with a paper
enitiled The Ages of Data by Phil Davies who
works for the European Radio Development team at Nortel
Networks. The paper addressed the problems they suffered
with increasing disk usage. A sizable amount of their budget
was spent each year on increasing storage capacity as the
demand for disk space was growing exponentially. The problem
is that it is difficult to know exactly how to control the
problem. A commonly suggested solution of imposing strict
disk quotas could mean people delete data to free up space
that may turn out to be useful in the future. CAD programs
are particularly guilty for taking up space as they weren't
designed with efficiency in mind or indeed for multi-user
systems. The CAD programs often store their libraries in the
users area meaning there's a lot of duplication, space which
could have been saved if the CAD programs were better
designed. Another idea was to delete projects over two years
old which were unused. However only 5% of the disk space was
used by projects over two years old which would save so
little disk space as to be worthless. However, if the
projects were deleted within a few months of completion
there would be the opportunity to save between 1/3 and 2/3
of the disk space. This, however, would severely limit the
potential of reuse of designs. However if 50% of the data
over one year old was deleted and all of the data over two
years old there'd be the potential to save 25% of the disk
space. Although this was not a significant amount it was
certainly worth considering.

Hierarchical storage offers the best of both worlds. It
keeps constantly accessed data online and moved older data
to cheaper but slower storage. It allows design reuse
without the large cost of online disk. However for a small
to medium sized data set, the cost of the hardware to
impliment this far outweighs the savings.

In an environment where the opportunity to reuse designs
is low then archive to tape is a reasonable solution. It is
an extension of the backup process and should be easily
implemented. However if files are regularly required to be
retrieved the time delays and system management time may
well cost more than the cost of keeping older disks online.

Their chosen solution was to retain the previous server
keeping data available for as long as needed. The disk and
tape size would be approximately doubled each year. Gentle
quotas would be applied which made the disk always appear
90% full and have occasional but aggressive 'tidy ups'.

The UKUUG vice-chairman, Simon Earthrowl, presented a
paper entitled Trend Spotting. The paper
presented ideas for the improved management of UNIX type
systems, using simple tools that are already available for
system administrators. He presented ideas of creating daemons
to automatically perform tasks that are normally routine and
tedious. A small amount of effort can save a large amount of
repetitive work in the future.

The final speaker was Adrien Belcourt with a presentation
entitled Internet Access Revenue Flows. As its
name suggested the presentation discussed the various ways
of making money out of providing Internet access. The
presentation compared how the situation differed in the USA
compared to the UK and Europe. Of particular interest was
how each country's percentage of the population with
Internet access varied. This was often down to a number of
factors such as the way ISP's charged for service or
telephone charges. In some European countries ISP charges
were so high it would work out cheaper for light Internet
users to dial up a free UK provider such as Freeserve. In
these areas there's room for competition.

Unsurprisingly the USA has a very high percentage of the
population with Internet access because of the free local
calls that just about every telephone company provide. The
only source of revenue in the USA is the subscription fees
and with the competition of ISP's these generally aren't
very high.

In the UK you're extremely lucky if you've got a local
Cable company that offers free calls to ISP's (even though
most offer free local calls to other phone customers). This
means that there are two possible ways in the UK to make
money out of Internet access. The first method is via the
subscription. Most people in the UK still pay a subscription
to their ISP's but once the free services improve more ISP's
will start offering their services free and many small ISP's
will die out.

Free providers like Freeserve are registered as a telco
so they get a share of the call charges to their service.
This is expensive to set up but means it's possible to
provide a service that appears free to its subscribers but
they still can make money. It's expected that more ISP's
will follow this route in the future. So the UK seems to be
going the opposite way to the US.

Proceedings were running about 10 minutes late so it was
straight to lunch. The lunch was a three course buffet style
meal with an excellent selection of food. That marked the
end of the conference and the end of an interesting two
days. The venue was excellent and there was a varied
selection of speakers.